How an ‘invisible’ police unit has hounded criminals for generations

Victoria Police’s new chief commissioner Mike Bush has made it clear his priority will be crime prevention, which means more cops out there being seen.

But one of his greatest assets will be a group of officers who pride themselves on never being spotted.

Stephen Asling is arrested by the special operations group in 1992. Fellow bandit Normie Lee was shot dead. The Dogs took these photos.

They have been known as the observation squad, the state surveillance unit, the Shadowers, or, to everyone inside the force, “the Dogs”.

In most of the headline arrests of serious gangsters, what you won’t see are the Dogs, who have usually guided the arrest team to the spot. And there are crimes, including murders, where the Dogs have cracked the case when crooks have snuck away to get rid of evidence, unaware their every move is being recorded by invisible observers.

Jim Cairns, an original member of the Dogs, later became deputy prime minister.

A few days ago, more than 100 serving and former Dogs (the oldest aged 93) gathered for the 90th anniversary of the group that has followed our most prolific crooks for generations.

The squad was only a year old when founding member, and later deputy prime minister, Jim Cairns was in a near-fatal confrontation with an armed robber.

On November 5, 1936, Cairns was following suspected murderer and armed robber Bill Cody, who had jumped on the Nicholson Street tram.

Cairns would later say: “Cody hopped in through the door of the tram with a .32 calibre revolver, pushed it into my chest and pulled the trigger. It didn’t go off. So I pushed him aside, and he took off, raced down through the tram and across into the Exhibition Gardens.

“I had a .25 calibre Browning automatic in my shirt pocket, and as I chased Cody, he’s turning around. By this time, he’s got his gun to go. I counted five shots that he fired in my direction – five. And when we got that far, I fired two in the air above him, and he called out, ‘I’ve had enough.’ So I caught up to him and pulled the gun from him.”

Unluckily, Cody chose the wrong copper to try to beat in a foot race, as Cairns was a local decathlon and long jump champion. Luckily, Cairns was a pacifist and didn’t shoot him.

There is brave, and then there is crazy brave: Robbo Robertson firmly fits the latter category.

Called to a bank silent alarm, Robertson’s partner Rod Porter (they were both unarmed) walked into the branch confident it would be a false call.

“I opened the door and saw an old lady on the ground,” Porter recalls. “I thought the old dear had fallen over, and I leant over to help her up.”

Jim Cairns’ police record.

His mood changed when a bandit yelled out to his partner: “Shoot him, shoot him.” There was a gunman on the counter pointing a shotgun at the cop.

Porter ran (he was no Stawell Gift winner) with the two armed crooks in pursuit. Robertson fired up the Dogs’ Valiant, tried to hit the gunmen, then put the car between Porter and the bandits.

When they took off in their stolen getaway car, Robertson “rammed them up the arse. That made them really happy.”

Porter was hiding in a yard and when he emerged, Robertson said: “Quick, get in. I know where they went.”

Porter remembers thinking: “This is a bloody stupid idea. This man is an idiot – why are we doing this?”

Both offenders were arrested.

The Dogs follow on foot, cars, bikes and motorbikes, and once when an offender went bush, an enterprising officer borrowed a horse from a nearby paddock and rode in bareback, finding the crook’s hideaway.

Then there was the non-ventilated “super truck” in which a cop, often in 40-degree heat, would sit for up to 10 hours watching a suspect house. Stripped of most of their clothes, the officer would use a peephole to peek and an empty bottle to pee. “It was a good way to lose weight,” one said.

In the early 1990s two crooks planned to break into a jeweller’s house in Malvern East, where they would hold the wife and children hostage, forcing him to return to his shop, open the safe and provide a fortune in valuable stones.

What is a police function without memorabilia?Credit: Naked City archives.

The Dogs were following them because they were wanted for another job. As they did dry runs on the house, their bugged conversations revealed the hostage plan.

On the night of the planned abduction, the Dogs were watching from a flat overlooking the house. Police had moved the family and replaced them with mannequins, apparently sleeping in their beds.

The crooks were behind a brick wall across the road. What they didn’t know was that on the other side of the wall was the special operations group, waiting for the right moment.

In crept the crooks, throwing back the blankets in the main bedroom, only to find two dummies. They bolted into the welcoming arms of the special operations group. Game over.

Another call for help started with police in Nepal, went to the Australian Federal Police, then to Victoria, and, finally, the Dogs.

A man had grabbed a woman in Melbourne after meeting her on a dating site, and then made a ransom demand to her Nepalese parents.

Somehow the Dogs found a likely address in Pakenham. One surveillance officer peered through a knothole in the fence from a vacant block to see a man digging a hole. It was not to plant tomatoes.

Retired senior sergeant Michael “Mouse” O’Connor, a veteran Dog, takes up the story. With reports from the ground and support from the air, it was clear the man was digging a grave.

“He lay down in it to see it was the right size. I was sure she was dead. Then he marches her out – she was wrapped in Glad Wrap. The SOG were en route, but it would have been too late. I told the boys to go.”

One dropped on all fours, so others could use him to vault over the fence.

“She was scooped up, and all she could say was, ‘Where did you come from?’” says O’Connor.

Some cases were sophisticated but not life and death. Australians are world-class shoplifters, and in the 1970s a family that would later become notorious gangsters were followed and grabbed with products worth $400,000.

In another case, a group of lithe young women entered a shop, then left, all apparently eight months pregnant.

One mob were more Benny Hill than The Untouchables – a shoplifting gang that used an attractive female member in a mini-skirt to bend over in a store, leaving the male shop assistant apparently hypnotised, allowing the rest of the crew to grab anything that wasn’t nailed down.

After the 1976 Great Bookie Robbery, a relative of Ray Chuck, the mastermind of the job, was followed to Queensland, where he lived in a beachside caravan park.

As the target didn’t have a car, there wasn’t much action and the Dogs deputised the woman who ran the park to eavesdrop on the crook’s calls that were made on the park’s party line.

Over six weeks, the woman did all the work while the Dogs crew took up surfing.

Police sometimes say they have hit a brick wall, but in one case such a wall saved crooks from certain arrest.

The notorious Gym Gang, a stick-up crew that pulled jobs over 24 years that netted well over $4.5 million, had just grabbed their biggest haul.

In 1994, the gang pretended to be a road crew working on the Monash Freeway, stopping an armoured van carrying about $2.3 million that had just been picked up at the Reserve Bank.

As they had rehearsed, the gang drove the van to a dead-end lane in Richmond to load into another vehicle. What they didn’t know was that behind the wall of a brick building at the end of the lane was the secret office of the surveillance branch.

The Dogs had security cameras facing the main street, but none into the laneway – meaning they missed their chance to nab the gang.

After the job, the Dogs would follow many of the suspects, finding they often met on suburban sports ovals to try to avoid listening devices. (One rode his bike everywhere in the hope he would be able to pick out the Dogs. Sometimes he did, but most times he didn’t.)

While one of the necessary skills is to be able to move without being noticed, there is also an art in staying still and not being seen.

Ian “Vag” Whitmore earned his nickname, according to O’Connor, because he could lie in a gutter for hours like a vagrant.

“He would hide in a garden or up a tree for eight or 10 hours to get photos and great results.”

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